


Gold Lust

by oneinspats



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, M/M, no alternate universe stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-26
Updated: 2013-12-26
Packaged: 2018-01-06 06:38:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1103630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneinspats/pseuds/oneinspats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone suffers from Gold Lust in one way or another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gold Lust

Bilbo tells Frodo – We all have a little bit of gold lust in us. We all have different forms of something we’d fight for, kill for, die for.

Frodo asks – But uncle, I thought that was a Dwarvin thing?

‘It is. For gold alone it is. Think on what is most precious to you in the world – that is your gold lust.’

Frodo thinks. He has just come of age and is looking for adventures without the risks so settles for his uncle’s stories. It is winter. Outside it is cold and sharp and dark.

‘Peace.’ The boy says at last.

Bilbo stares at him for a long moment. Frodo cannot read his face. At last the older hobbit says, ‘Then you’re a better person than I am, Frodo.’ A light, flashing, brittle smile, ‘though I can hardly say I am surprised.’

 

 

 

Thorin asked him, ‘have you ever killed before?’

Bilbo said, ‘well, we do eat animals cooked. So yes. In a manner of speaking.’

 

 

 

‘Perhaps the Shire.’ Frodo is standing in the kitchen the next morning. He’s being missish with his tea and leaves in cooling by the window.

‘The Shire what?’

‘As my gold lust. The Shire.’

Bilbo nods. He says he understands this. The shire with its golden yellow fields. Its golden flowers, golden sunsets.

‘Home,’ Bilbo amends. ‘Everyone has that as their gold lust.’

‘Isn’t the Shire home, uncle?’

‘Home, Frodo my lad, is where the heart is.’

Frodo thinks that it’s too early to point out that this isn’t, strictly speaking, an answer.

 

 

 

 

Gold is warm and hot and fluid. It is sliding and slippery and grasping. It sucked him in, held him, blinded him and all he thought was – How did the sun enter this lonely mountain?

He felt the gold around him. It bore down on him. It was difficult to breath, difficult to think, and then there was a weight. A weight in his pocket, there were whispers in his mind, whispers and whispers and aloud, to someone near him, his asks, ‘what’s in my pocket?’

And Kili or maybe Fili, he cannot remember which, answered, ‘whatever you put in there.’

When he stumbled out into the hall the air is like a slap to the face and he was gasping, dry heaving on the floor.

In his pocket was a ring.

In his pocket was a stone.

He didn’t remember finding it. He wondered if he’d die for it.

 

 

 

The conversation slips away from them and Frodo doesn’t remember it until years later. There is a strange man in yellow boots holding a yellow ring and then putting the yellow-gold-gold-gold ring on and laughing.

Laughing.

This bothers Frodo. He doesn’t know why.

 

 

 

 

Dragons are like gold, Bilbo thought. They are bright, flashy, and deadly.

Below him are elves. Below him are rocks. Below him is air.

Funny, he thought, I’ve never noticed that Thorin’s eyes are like sapphires. That they are so very blue.

The king was shouting, snarling, he was a trapped animal. A half-mad trapped animal.

Funny, he thought, I’ve always supposed them to be golden.

Height does things to the mind. It makes you want to lean over and spread your arms and fall. Because height makes it all less real. Makes it all so much more distant and less _there._ Bilbo wanted to tell this to Thorin. Yes, he had wanted to say, I am scared but at the same time. If you were not holding me I’d probably have jumped already. For there is a golden sun above me and a golden bird just out of reach and I’d have wanted to grasp them both.

 

 

 

Samwise Gamgee is the only hobbit Frodo knows who doesn’t want a single thing in the world. Other than what any person would want, of course – a home, a living, a family, friends.

Frodo wants things. He is too much of his uncle to not want things. When the council selects him to bear the ring he thinks, I cannot because I am like Bilbo and both of us are created from the fibres of this ring.

He says, I’ll take the ring, although I do not know the way.

He doesn’t say, I’ll take the ring, although I do not know the way I can destroy it.

 

 

 

Thorin didn’t drop him. Thorin’s eyes didn’t become gold. His teeth didn’t become sharp dragon fangs. Instead, he became obsidian. Eyes black, hard, otherworldly. Ancient. Black gold.

Bilbo had read, once, of a tower of obsidian that was breathing earth and had been crafted in the Elder Days. They conducted magical spells, read the stars, watched over the middle lands between kingdoms. Before they fell, of course.

A wizard lived there now, apparently. He wondered what kind of man could live in a tower of stone and not become the stone itself. Obsidian eyed, souled, and hearted.

 Go, Thorin said. You are banished.

He was lowered down to the elves. He did not jump. He did not flyingly fall. He did not grasp the golden sun, the golden bird. Thorin had not been able to drop him.

 

 

 

Gandalf tells Frodo, ‘I think your uncle was almost unable to give up the ring.’ The hobbit can feel Boromir’s eyes boring into him. Child of the White City that, Aragorn says, is cut from marble and mountain side.

Frodo wonders if his family is cursed by mountains and the people and creatures from them.

‘He had it for so long.’

Gandalf nods. He puffs absently, makes smoke rings which are perfectly round.

‘It took him forty years before he could begin writing.’

Frodo waits. The wizard is taking his time.

‘I’m glad he finally began,’ Gandalf continues. It’s more to himself than to Frodo. ‘I think because he was writing he was able to let it go.’

‘Let what go?’

‘Oh? Hm, nothing.’ The wizard smiles. Frodo points out that this is not an answer. The wizard only nods and says that sometimes you cannot let go things that you should and at other times you let go the things you shouldn’t have and sometimes, sometimes you do what you were meant to do all along.

 

 

Thorin’s eyes were sapphires.

Bilbo told him this when he couldn’t think of anything to say because what can you say to a dying man?

The dwarf king coughed and sort of laughed. He did smile, which Bilbo counted as something. It reminded him of the sun on the fields of the Shire. He hadn’t thought of home in so long. He wondered it the wheat was still golden. If it was the same sun that shone on death here that shone on life there. It if it was the same golden, golden sun. The same blue, blue –

‘Though I think hobbits would compare them to the sky.’

‘We dwarfs…never had much love for the sky.’

‘And we hobbits never had much love for the dark places of the earth.’

They remained in silence for the rest of the time. When Thorin died Bilbo thought – Well, it wouldn’t have worked anyway.

He thought that for the entire journey home.

He thought that for fifty more years.

He thought that for the entire journey to Rivendell and from Rivendell to the Grey Havens and from the Grey Havens to –

Because if he didn’t – well he didn’t know what would happen.

 

 

 

It is Samwise, the hobbit who never wanted anything, who is the reason Frodo is alive.

‘I couldn’t do it,’ he tells Sam. Coughing and gasping and shaking. ‘I failed.’

‘No you didn’t Mr Frodo,’ Sam says. Staunch, loyal, stubborn Sam. ‘It was never supposed to be done alone. These things are never done alone. You did it, Mr Frodo, we all did it.’

‘Sam.’

‘Frodo?’

‘What is it in this world that is most precious to you?’

Around them is fire and black rock and melting stones and lava.

‘Why you, Mr Frodo. You happy and whole and without that blasted ring.’

When Frodo laughs he finds he is crying, too.

He wonders if his uncle had ever had the luck to feel as free as he did right now.

 

 

Thorin asked him, ‘have you ever killed before?’

Bilbo has an answer, now, as he stares at the growing horizon.  As the boat rocks and drifts, and follows the tide forward towards the beautiful golden sun on a beautiful golden sea.

‘Yes,’ he tells the dwarf king. ‘Everything I have ever cared for. And mostly by accident.’ And he wants to ask the long dead almost-king. ‘What is it that you hold most precious in this world? Because I don’t think it was the gold, as it was for me. As it always was for me.’

 


End file.
